Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

The nuclear family is back with a vengeance, it seems, if indeed it ever went away.  But what with everyone at the last Oscars falling over themselves trying to show off their children and moms, and even Britney Spears about to give birth, the most glamorous, fulfilling, and deep thing you can do nowadays is to squirt out 2.5 children and puff yourself out beneath the righteous flag of Family.  And to find this current coursing through several recent Hollywood blockbusters--The Incredibles, War of the Worlds, only to land, a little touched but still pristinely didactic, into the twisted universe of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is getting to be rather alarming.  After all, except in the few occasions when they are eccentric obsessives, parents in Roald Dahl stories are either gruesomely killed off or horridly gruesome themselves, leaving their children to take up with insects, giants, and cigar-smoking grandmothers.  The new movie subtly deflates Willy Wonka's dangerous perversity by tacking on and pounding in the story of his integration into the Bucket family.  The movie just can't deal with the idea of an effeminate adult man who gives candy to children and leave it at that, with ragged edges and cruelties left in place.  It has to coax him into the soft and fuzzy narrative of the hurt man-child who needs an adorably cozy family to teach him about love.  The thing is, I was thoroughly charmed by the ragamuffin Buckets with their horrid teeth and tottering cottage in the opening of the film, perhaps spurred by my love for Noah Taylor. It wasn't until they were rallied into the cause of Family  vs. Dandy at the end of the film that I started to balk.  And Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka started out promisingly enough by channelling Mr. Jellinek from Strangers with Candy, but lost his poreless, otherworldly, cgi-sheen and creepy awkwardness with the 4th "mumbler!" gag. 

The most disappointing part of the movie was precisely in the area where I thought Tim Burton would excel.  The visual spectacle of the chocolate factory's inner workings weren't nearly as awful as the ill-conceived, Cirque du Soleil sequences that are supposed to pass for never-never-land in Finding Neverland, a movie whose insulting sappiness hovers too closely around this one.  But I found myself missing the lickable wallpaper, sudsy locomotive, levitation soda, and atomic-model-like Everlasting Gobstopper from the original film.  The new film moves briskly and mechanically from one child's demise to the next, replacing the detours into Charlie's transgressions  that propelled the original film with Wonka's childhood flashbacks.  These would have been amusing if they hadn't been mere set-ups for a big family hug that ends the film. --Irene

Comments

[Brian]

Fantastic review, Irene. Keep it up! (As doctoral studies permit, of course.)

[adriana]

Bravo! This is a fantastic review. It's also interesting to read this onslaught of the nuclear family in the context of celebrity lives. You'll notice that most news references to Burton and Depp almost never fail to mention that both are partnered (but not married. cripes!) with children. What to make of this?